Andrew Kaplan - Carrie's run

“How did she come to leave Halba?”

“You know the famous actress Rana? The one who’s on the television?”

“Rana Saadi?” Carrie said, her mind racing. It wasn’t just the magazine photo!

“That’s the one. Rana’s father and poor Hamid Ali, to Allah we belong, were friends in al-Murabitun. Rana came from Tripoli and took her to Beirut. They were going to become models there. I warned her against it. There are many Christians and unbelievers in Beirut. Much that is haram , I told her. But she said, ‘I have nothing but my looks, Khala. It’s the only chance I have. And I’ll be with my father’s friend’s daughter.’ ”

“Why would Rana take her?”

“ Ikram. A debt of honor. Hamid Ali had saved Rana’s father’s life in the civil war.”

“ Min fathleki , excuse me, I understand her father, to Allah we belong, was a hero, but Dima didn’t strike me as political-or religious. Not to say she wasn’t a good Muslim girl, but you know what I mean,” Carrie said.

The aunt looked at her sharply. “She knew who her father was and who she was, alhamdulillah, ” Aunt Majida said. Thank God.

“Of course, Allahu akbar ,” Carrie murmured. God is great.

“ Allahu akbar ,” the aunt said sternly.

So Dima was a Sunni Muslim who had moved a long way from her roots, Carrie thought on the way back to Beirut in Virgil’s Peugeot. She was driving south on the coast road. To her left were fields and clusters of houses and on her right, beyond the houses, the sea. Well, haven’t we all? A point Saul had made when she spoke with him on an encrypted cell phone call last night.

“Beirut Station’s blown. This place is a shambles,” she told him.

“How bad is it?” Saul asked, his voice a bit blurry from the encryption.

“Listen, if a fashion photographer in Gemmayzeh knows Fielding is CIA, everybody knows. That’s how bad.”

“And Dima?”

“She comes from Halba. That little tidbit wasn’t in her 201,” Carrie said.

Saul caught it right away. She loved that about him. “Is it possible she’s Sunni?” he said.

“I’m checking it out. Kind of leaves us nowhere in figuring out how New York happened. A Sunni op set up by Shiites? And according to Fielding, Dima was supposed to be March 14, which is Christian. Makes no sense. Not in Lebanon.”

“There’s something else going on. We’re not seeing it,” he said. “What about this other woman, Rana?”

“She’s from the north too. Tripoli. Also probably Sunni. She and Dima knew each other. Their fathers did too. Interesting, huh?”

“What does it tell you?” he said.

“Maybe Rana is part of it.”

“Obviously. What else?”

“They were outsiders. Both of them.”

“Aren’t we all?” he said, reminding her of their conversation just before she left.

Saul had come over to drive her the short distance from her apartment in Reston to Dulles International for the flight to Beirut.

“Keep clear of Beirut Station, especially Fielding,” he warned her. “Otherwise you’ll never find out what’s going on.”

“What if we run into each other? Beirut’s a small town sometimes.”

“Tell him you’re on a Special Access op.” Special Access operations were the CIA’s highest-level operations that could only be authorized directly by the director of the CIA and were on a strict need-to-know basis, including those with top secret clearance, even station chiefs. “If he makes a fuss, refer him to me or to David. Remember, no one from Beirut Station is to even know you’re in Lebanon.”

“Except Virgil.”

“No one else. You can’t come to Langley for help either. You’re on your own.”

“Story of my life,” she said.

Saying it, she remembered the little white house on Farragut Avenue in Kensington and how none of their neighbors spoke to them after her father bought a big RV trailer and parked it in the driveway, and when the neighbors asked where he was going, her father told them it was so he could take the family to the Great Lakes to see the miracle. And how she and Maggie had no friends because playdates at their house were unimaginable and they couldn’t go to other kids’ houses either because their father might call. Her mother was of no help and her sister, Maggie, only wanted out. Theirs was a house of silence, each of them hiding from the others as if madness was contagious like the flu.

“Sometimes I think you prefer it alone,” Saul said.

“I’ve always been an outsider.”

“All of us. This is a business for outsiders,” he said.

“You too?”

“Are you kidding? Can you even begin to imagine what it was like growing up as the only Orthodox Jewish kid in tiny white-bread Calliope, Indiana? In the fifties and early sixties? My parents were Holocaust survivors. It made them ultra-Orthodox. They clung to God as if to the side of a cliff. My father owned the local drugstore. But there was no one like us in that town. We were like Martians in that place.

“I couldn’t participate in anything like Christmas pageants at school. Anything goyish or that even smacked of what they considered idolatry. I had to fight with my parents just to say the Pledge of Allegiance because there was a metal eagle at the top of the flagpole. I couldn’t even play Little League even though I loved baseball, because they began the games with a prayer that mentioned Jesus. We’re all outsiders, Carrie. The reason we do this is because this is the only profession that’ll let us in.”

She was driving south, approaching Byblos, the town where the word “bible” came from, when she got the call from Virgil. Ahead, she could see Byblos’s old city, crowded along the Mediterranean coast, and in clusters on the hills white houses, churches and a mosque.

“We got a hit,” Virgil said.

“I’m listening.”

“She made a call on that cell phone, our little actress. I tracked who it went to via the No Such database. Your pal Jimbo. You do collect admirers, Sweet Pea.” Virgil called the NSA “No Such” because for a long time the joke in Washington had been that the acronym for the super-secret National Security Agency stood for “No Such Agency.” “Sweet Pea,” his sarcastic nickname for her, rhymed with “Sweet C,” for “Sweet Caroline,” the Neil Diamond song.

“Cut the crap, Vee. Who was it?”

“An old friend of yours. A certain singing little birdie?”

Oh my God! Nightingale, she thought excitedly. Taha al-Douni. It closed the circle: Dima-Nightingale-Rana. And don’t forget the third woman in the photo, she reminded herself. Marielle.

“What’d they say?”

“I’ll tell you tonight. The usual place? Twenty fifteen?” That meant he didn’t want to speak about it over a cell phone connection. The usual place was the circular Khalil Gibran Garden, opposite the UN House in the Hamra district. Subtracting forty-five minutes from 2015 hours meant to meet him at 1930 hours. Seven thirty P.M.

“Okay, bye.”

“ Ma’al salaama ,” he said mockingly, and ended the call.

Driving along the coast, the sun shining on the sea, she had never felt better, almost as if she were gliding unmoving on the air like a hawk. Although she couldn’t see all the pieces in the puzzle, she could sense them falling into place. Everything was perfect. A feeling of well-being enveloped her, like slipping into a warm bathtub. She was closing in on what had happened and who was behind it. They were just out of sight, behind a curtain that rose behind Beirut like the mountains. It was all coming together. Like sex at that moment when it starts to build and you’re not there yet, but you can feel it coming and it’s getting better and better.